IV. Narrative: Substance and Context
Imagining American Cities through Twenty-first Century Performance
The objective of the proposed research is to examine the ways different performative
genres and practices imagine and reconfigure specific twenty-first-century cities in the Americas.
We have established three broad areas of inquiry to achieve this objective: 1) How do
conventionally staged theater and urban intervention illuminate the mutually constitutive
relationship between urban topography and memory politics? 2) To what extent can performance
establish sites of resistance to the spatialized conflicts, divisions, and inequalities that manifest
the effects of neoliberal processes on the city? 3) How do site-specific performances and
interventions in city space create communities of spectatorship that transcend local or national
frameworks, and to what extent can imagining global spectatorship provide a model for a shared
sense of empathy beyond place?
Our theoretical approach fuses performance and urban studies and proposes the polemical
“global city” as a central concept in our investigation of the imagination of contemporary cities
through performance. The scope of our research includes performance spanning cities across
North and South America. Our objective here is to unsettle longstanding binaries, stereotypes and
identity tropes that have traditionally imposed disciplinary and ideational borders between the
North and South. In this regard our project builds upon the interdisciplinary, hemispheric
approach to engaging performance and politics in the Americas, innovated in large part by
NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.1 Moreover, focusing on performance
in cities across the Americas encourages the destabilization of conventional cultural, linguistic,
racial, and geographical divides, and thus responds forcefully to the aims put forth by NEH’s new
1
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/
1
Bridging Cultures initiative. In adapting this hemispheric lens and proposing a joint approach
based on cutting--edge research in the areas of performance theory and urban studies, our project
forges novel interdisciplinary paths and lays the foundations for important intellectual work that
will be of value to scholars and students across the arts and the humanities.
By focusing on performance, our project participates in the disciplinary shift, pioneered
by performance scholar Diana Taylor, to destabilize the primacy of the written text as a form of
cultural expression and to emphasize, rather, the significance of embodied forms of transmission
of meaning and knowledge through temporally and spatially framed “scenarios.”2 Further, we
agree with D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga’s assertion that the city is more than “a 'text'
to be read and (re)written” and that “textuality and performativity must be understood as linked
cultural practices” in imagining the city and structuring its social encounters. 3 Thus, our project
privileges the optic of performance studies to engage the city but never loses sight of the dynamic
interplay between text, image, and embodiment in conceptualizing the city and its diverse textual
and textural manifestations.4
According to Neil Brenner and Roger Keil, global cities are urban centers that in recent
decades have transcended “their respective national city systems and have come to articulate
localized economic, demographic and sociocultural processes to a broader, globalized
configuration of capitalism.”5 The term “global city” was at first greeted with resistance from
scholars who saw in the term the reinforcement of historical relationships of imperial dominance,
financial dependency, and social polarization imposed by the financial centers of global
capitalism such as New York, Chicago, London, and Tokyo.6 More recently, however, global city
researchers have argued that the global city concept contributes crucially to refuting the
2
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 16.
Hopkins, Orr, and Solga, Performance and the City, 6.
4
Adams, Hoelscher, Till, Textures of Place. Exploring Humanist Geographies, xiii.
5
Brenner and Keil, The Global Cities Reader, 5.
6
John Friedmann’s essay “The World City Hypothesis” (1986) is an important precursor to the
development of the global city paradigm, later the centerpiece for Saskia Sassen’s book The
Global City (1991).
3
2
homogenizing vision of globalization as an abstract signifier detached from site-specific practices
and operations.7
This latest phase of global cities research offers a refined lens for our examination of
performance and cities because it reasserts the politics of place in contemporary debates about
globalization.8 In doing so it points toward novel ways of understanding relationships between
urban spaces and globalization without resuscitating the already exhausted binary between the
local and the global. Moreover, the concept of the global city captures new and emerging
processes that are reconfiguring cities as dominant, supranational signifiers of social, political,
legal, and economic identity. This project investigates the ways theater and performance
intervene in urban space to re-imagine the city while capturing these processes and the tensions
between national, transnational, and global paradigms. Against the destabilization of the nationstate, the emergence of the global city ushers in a host of novel aesthetic practices designed to
capture this reconfiguration of identity, place, and power.
Concrete examples of these kinds of novel twenty-first-century performative practices
that are of central interest to this project include works by The Builders Association, a
performance and media company based in New York City; Emilio García Wehbi, a creator of
object theater and urban intervention from Buenos Aires; and Mapa Teatro, an interdisciplinary
theater and performance group based in Bogotá. The Builders Association’s two recent projects,
Invisible Cities (2005-2007) and Continuous City (2007-present)9 explore the impact digital
technologies have on subjectivity, family relationships, and the ways individuals and groups from
diverse socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds access, experience, and engage cities
and create urban imaginaries. García Wehbi’s urban intervention, Philoctetes Project (2002-
7
Brenner and Keil, The Global Cities Reader, 76.
See Brenner and Keil, The Global Cities Reader (2005); Doreen Massey, World City (2007);
Sharon Zukin, Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (2010); Michael Peter
Smith, Transnational Urbanism. Locating Globalization (2000); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the
Network Society (1996).
9
http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/prod_invisible_info.html
8
3
2007) 10 employs life-like dolls placed strategically in urban space to turn the city into a forum for
examining the responses of urban bystanders to homelessness. Though originally conceptualized
in the context of the neoliberal nineties in Argentina, subsequent stagings in Vienna (2002),
Berlin (2004), and Prague (2007) provide rich material for examining the potential for interurban
dialogue and comparative analysis of the effect of global neoliberalism on cities in the twentyfirst century. Mapa Teatro’s mulitmedia installation/performance of Witness to the Ruins (20012005) 11 documents the demolition of one of Bogotá’s most traditional neighborhoods—Santa
Inés-El Cartucho--and the eviction of its inhabitants, many of whom had found refuge in the
neighborhood after fleeing the violence of the Colombian countryside.12 Demolished in order to
create a city space evocatively called “Third Millennium Park,”13 Witness to the Ruins lays bare
the complicated politics of conflicting claims to the city and attempts to reconcile what should
constitute the vision and practices of the city of Bogotá at the dawn of the new millennium.
The theorization of the concept of the global city has typically been employed to explain
a critical relationship between capitalism, urban space, and geography. As such, it follows a long
line of work from Georg Simmel to Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, and David Harvey as the
latest incarnation of urban studies research to link capitalism to urban processes.14 However, this
project expands the definition, disciplinary scope and application of the concept of the global city
to move beyond the economic dimension and explore the aesthetic, political, and social
expression of the global city.
In addition to traditional global cities like New York, and other major urban centers of
commerce and capital flow, such as Buenos Aires, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São
Paulo, our project directs attention to cities that do not meet conventional criteria for being
labeled as global cities, such as Montevideo, Juárez, Havana, New Orleans, and Bogotá, but
10
Proyecto Filoctetes. http://www.portaldedramaturgos.com.ar/garciawehbi/
Testigo de las Ruinas. http://www.mapateatro.org/testigoDeLasRuinas/index.html.
12
http://www.mapateatro.org/testigoDeLasRuinas/index.html
13
El Parque Tercer Milenio.
14
Brenner and Keil, The Global Cities Reader, 7.
11
4
which nonetheless have generated performative practices that create and reflect site-specific
urban identities that resonate globally. Our research echoes Andreas Huyssen’s objective,
expressed in his book Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, to
lend critical insight to the “imaginative geographies of alternative or different modern ties that are
usually sidelined by the still-dominant focus on the northern transatlantic in much of the Western
academy.”15 In reference to Latin America, in particular, this project contributes to the body of
scholarship that strives to question and complicate the legacy of what Ángel Rama famously
identified as the lettered city in Latin America, or the literary invention of the city by Latin
American colonial elites to consolidate power and impose administrative and religious order. 16 In
broadening our field to include a region underrepresented in global urban studies, our project
unsettles this legacy and exposes the productive synergies between performance and Latin
American cities in the twenty-first century.
Scholars from fields as diverse as literature, sociology, geography, theater, architecture,
and urban studies have long been captivated by the relationship between the lived and the
imagined city. Néstor García Canclini refers to the “heterogeneous fantasies” that fill the city and
give it density as a jointly inhabited and imagined place.17 He writes, “The city, programmed to
function, and designed in a grid, exceeds its boundaries and multiplies itself through individual as
well as collective fictions” (43). Andreas Huyssen invokes an urban imaginary comprised of both
cognitive and somatic images, Edward Soja invents a “third space” to encompass a
“simultaneously real-and-imagined, actual-and-virtual” space, and Ileana Diéguez juxtaposes the
real/everyday to the poetic/fictional experience of the city.18 Of primary interest to our project is
the specific contribution performance studies makes to investigating what the geographer Doreen
Massey calls “a global sense of place” at the intersection between the lived and imagined city.
15
Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds. Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, 15.
Rama, La ciudad letrada, 23-41.
17
Canclini, Ibid., 43.
18
Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds, 3; Soja, Postmetropolis, 11; Diéguez, Escenarios
liminales, 119.
16
5
We propose three sections of interrelated questions to approach the imagination of twenty-first
century American cities through performance.
Biographical maps, city space, and global memory
Performance intervenes in the city to sustain or contain conflict, to enact sites of commemoration
and remembrance, and to exploit the tensions between site-specific memories, officially
sanctioned national memories, and decontextualized memory tropes that are adapted and
circulated globally. Alison Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory is useful for understanding
the notion of decontextualized memory tropes. She introduces the term prosthetic memory to
refer to the “interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential
site such as a movie theater or museum.” This kind of memory, disembodied and transportable,
allows individuals to make contact with other narratives and subsequently enter into a broader
history that shapes their subjectivity and politics.19 We are interested in examining how
performance draws attention to the protagonists who occupy this space of fluid engagement
between the experiential site of the city and memory. How do individuals and groups document
their lives and memories as city dwellers through theatrical scripts, performative practices, and
everyday behavior? What does the biographical nature of many of these performative interactions
with the city reveal about the anxieties of self, place, and identity in twenty-first century cities in
the Americas?
Walter Benjamin, Michel De Certeau, and Pierre Nora’s work linking memory and place
is foundational for our examination of urban topography and memory politics in twenty-first
century American cities.20 Also significant in shaping the parameters of our project is
contemporary scholarship on the discourse of ruins, presented compellingly in Idelber Avelar’s
19
Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 2.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project; De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Nora, The Realms
of Memory.
20
6
work on allegory and Latin American postdictatorial fiction in The Untimely Present:
Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, and more recently in Michael
Lazzara and Vicky Unruh’s The Telling Ruins in Latin America. Avelar’s work resonates strongly
with Sharon Zukin’s argument that cities embody the “division of place between landscapes of
consumption and devastation.”21 Both Avelar and Zukin draw attention to the force of global
capitalism in constructing sites and metaphors of ruin and consumption in cities, while Lazzara
and Unruh signal the heightened importance of reevaluating the discourse of ruins at the twentyfirst century millennial juncture and identifying in ruins the “material embodiment of change.”22
Our project establishes dialogue with this valuable work but initiates a conscious departure from
identifying the discourse of ruins exclusively with Latin America. We propose that each city’s
engagement with memory and discourses of ruins, renewal, consumption, utopia and dystopia is
unique and resists the conflation of urban social and artistic formations with national or even
North/South identity paradigms.
The global cities concept provides a critical dimension for understanding both sitespecific urban performances of memory (commemoration, memorialization, protest) and the
circulation of discursive memory tropes in twenty-first century cities in the Americas. To
conceptualize the interface between these different kinds of memories, we borrow from
Huyssen’s notion of cities as “palimpsests of real and diverse experiences and memories” and
Paul Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen Till’s emphasis on the “texture” of place to invoke a
sense of surface, as they note, “where subject and object merge.” 23 This merging between object
and subject--or built environment and biographical experience--generates urban modes of
expression that shape the contours of memory and the identity of cities. We aim to investigate the
central role playwrights, actors, directors, and artist-activists occupy as agents of these urban
modes of expression. Further, we ask how performances of testimony and biographical accounts
21
Zukin, Landscapes of Power, 5.
Lazzara and Unruh, The Telling Ruins, 1.
23
Huyssen, Present Pasts, 3; Till, Textures of Place, xiii.
22
7
shape and/or reimagine the city and we examine the ways in which these performances exploit
the tensions between site-specific and decontextualized, global memories.
Our project borrows from Michael Rothberg’s term “multidirectional memory” to
conceptualize these dynamic tensions and to approach the interactions between different
historical memories produced across contexts and eras.24 Rothberg urges a shift away from
notions of competitive, or hierarchical memories to advocate instead for the creation of new
comparative memory paradigms, which “draw attention to the dynamic transfers that take place
between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance,” and “traverse sacrosanct
borders of ethnicity and era” (11, 17). This project investigates the role of performance in
mediating between memories as they intersect topographically and discursively in cities of the
Americas. Moreover, we join Rothberg in privileging a comparative framework for approaching
distinct memories in order to rethink the ethical and political dimensions of memory and its
relationship to place in the context of our conceptual rendering of the global city.
Global neoliberalism and grassroots intervention
Ideas, technologies, information, and capital flow freely in and out of cities while changes in
urban topography often provide the most explicit manifestation of the effects of neoliberal
globalization on cities. In recent literature criticizing the social polarization and structural income
disparities in cities as a consequence of these effects, scholars have identified the “dual city,” a
city which, as Simon Parker explains, “consists of highly paid executives, professionals and
technocrats who work (but do not reside) alongside a low paid, low skilled and generally
ethnically diverse service class.”25 Related concepts such as the edge city, the “revanchist city”,26
24
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3.
See Friedmann,“The World City Hypothesis,” 1986, and Mollenkopf and Castells, Dual City:
Restructuring New York, 1991. Qtd. in Parker, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience.
Encountering the City, 113.
26
Urban geographer Neil Smith coins the term “revanchist city” in his book, The New Urban
25
8
gentrification, and ghettoization all describe to a certain extent the ways neoliberalism
respatializes cities and accentuates social, political, ethnic, gender, and economic divisions. As a
remedy to the spatialized hierarchies envisioned in the “dual city,” researchers like Michael Peter
Smith have advocated for “an agency-oriented theoretical perspective that concretely connects
macro-economic and geopolitical transformations to the micro-networks of social action that
people create, move in, and act upon in their daily lives.”27 Following Smith, this part of our
project explores this agency-oriented perspective through an examination of theater and
performance at the grassroots level. This project takes as its point of departure that both formal
and informal performances, as spatially defined practices, are ideally suited to addressing the
spatialization of conflict and division in cities that result from neoliberalism. We interrogate the
forms and strategies these interventions take on and the ways in which they constitute and enact
political resistance and opposition at the neighborhood, city, national, and global level.
This part of the project strives to evaluate how actors of resistance and opposition have
evolved in their engagement with metropolitan culture specifically through theater and
performative practices in twenty-first century cities in the Americas. Taking our cue from
Michael Peter Smith, we emphasize grassroots strategies here to distinguish our approach from
dominant trends in urban theorizing, which, according to Smith, “have equated the ‘global’ with
the space of top-down political-economic power.”28 Smith advocates for a redirection of focus on
“the impact of ordinary women and men—their consciousness, intentionality, everyday practices,
and collective action—on the social construction of urban life ” (6). Though this statement
reflects the vision of our project to an extent, we are wary of the homogenizing potential to be
found in citing the “ordinary” or “everyday” to describe individuals engaged in oppositional
practices. As Ben Highmore observes, “To invoke the everyday can often be a sleight of hand that
Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, in which he describes the way neoliberal
economic policy altered urban politics in New York City in the nineties to favor gentrification
and discriminate against communities of minorities, the working class, and immigrants.
27
Smith, Transnational Urbanism. Locating Globalization, 6.
28
Ibid.
9
normalises and universalises particular values, specific world-views.”29 Our project consciously
avoids universalizing the everyday and oppositional practices through identification of the
individual actors and groups involved in those practices, their particular reasons and forms of
resistance to specific aspects of global neoliberalism, and analysis of the distinct historical
circumstances, contexts, and objectives illustrated through each performance.
Our project includes cities across the Americas whose social structure and topographical
organization reflect the polarizing divisions captured by the “dual city,” a concept that describes
the ways the experience of the city is largely determined by access to basic rights such as
education, freedom from racial, gender, and linguistic discrimination, and citizenship. This part of
our project strives to demonstrate how theater pieces, performances, and other artistic
interventions address themes of immigration, border crossing, citizenship, and human rights and
their intersection with global neoliberal processes in the transnational spaces that American cities
have become. In doing we illuminate these distinct grassroots modes of practice and show how
they deploy strategies for transcending the limitations posed by the dual city, a concept which,
though relevant, cannot pretend to encompass the nuance and complexity of rapidly changing
configurations of global neoliberalism, urban space, and the vast and diverse range of subjective
experiences of cities in the twenty-first century. Here we revisit Henri Lefebvre’s book The Right
to the City, in which he envisions this right to refer not only to participation in consumer society,
but, more significantly, to participation in the oeuvre or aesthetic life of the city.30 We revitalize
Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city and emphasize its relevance to our investigation of
theater and performative practices as alternative identities and modes of expression that respond
critically to global neoliberalism.
Imagination, Reception, and Circulation of the Twenty-first Century City
29
Highmore, The Everyday Reader, 1.
See Simon Parker’s discussion of Lefebvre’s The Right to the City in Urban Theory and the
Urban Experience. Encountering the City, 20.
30
10
Traditionally, street performance has aimed to intervene in city space and engage passersby as
spectators. Brecht’s street scene reminds us that city dwellers may be called on at any moment to
act as witnesses to a city’s accidents and improvised events. Boal’s invisible theater enacts social
justice scenarios in public spaces to encourage self-reflection and awareness among unsuspecting
bystanders. In focusing on the production, reception, and circulation of twenty-first century city
imaginaries in the Americas, this section echoes Lefebvre’s assertion that “each epoch produces
its own spaces.”31 We extend this argument to question and analyze the modes of spectatorship
our current twenty-first century epoch creates. Our interest lies in examining an ethics of
spectatorship generated by urban performance and more traditional forms of theater to explore
what Doreen Massey has identified as “the idea of responsibility beyond place.”32 How might this
“responsibility beyond place” help us to imagine the ways site-specific performance practices
generate a shared sense of empathy and responsibility--or conversely, detachment and distance-that resonates beyond national borders? How does urban performance reterritorialize and
politicize city space to express alternative identities and newly formed communities to an
audience? And what is the role of the performance in mediating the relationships between cities
and shifting cultures of responsibility and communities of spectatorship?
Underlying Benedict Anderson’s famous Imagined Communities is the tension that exists
between the social and symbolic construction of national identity and the spatial and temporal
dimensions of this construction.33 This tension reveals the anxiety of place in a globalizing era
defined by the concepts of time-space compression, 34 space of flows,35 and the spatial turn.36
Arjun Appadurai asks poignantly, “What can locality mean in a world where spatial localization,
31
Qtd. in Parker, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience, 22.
Massey, World City, 15.
33
Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. See
also Donald, “Metropolis. The City as Text,” in King, Re-presenting the City, 1.
34
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change,
1990.
35
Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the
Urban Regional Process, 1989.
36
Soja, Postmetropolis, 2001.
32
11
quotidian interaction, and social scale are not always isomorphic?”37 This anxiety of place has
permeated across disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences and has prompted theater
scholars such as Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri to engage critical dialogue on “the idea of
space and place conscious performance.” 38 They write, “In recent decades, a vigorous inquiry
into the role of spatial experience in constructing cultural meaning has been under way in many
fields, resulting in renewed interest in topography, geography, and mapping, as well as new
attention to the specificity of place ” (6). Gestures toward more global, less spatially anchored
interpretations of performance provide a productive complement--and sometimes contradiction-to this heightened scrutiny of place. Theater scholar Marvin Carlson remarks, “We are now at
least equally likely to look at the theatre experience in a more global way, as a sociocultural event
whose meanings and interpretations are not to be sought exclusively in the text being performed
but in the experience of the audience assembled to share in the creation of the total event.”39
Our project proposes the lens of performance to investigate the tensions between this
heightened attention to place and the global reconfiguration of reception as they intersect in
twenty-first century cities of the Americas. Three driving questions guide this third section of our
investigation. First, we analyze theatrical works that imagine cities in a global framework and
highlight the role of the city as an emerging signifier of identity and community that transcends
the paradigm of nation. Second, we consider theatrical performances that travel from city to city
and the range of identificatory processes these transurban performances evoke in audiences in
different cities across the globe. Third, we examine the phenomenon of synchronicity in
performances that are staged and perceived simultaneously, made possible largely through live
streaming and other forms of multimedia and technological strategies. In all three areas, our
overriding objective is to illuminate the ways these performances participate in the
37
Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 179.
Fuchs and Chaudhuri, Land/Scape/Theater, 4.
39
Carlson, Places of Performance: Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, 2.
38
12
reconfiguration of paradigms of spectatorship and gesture toward a shared sense of empathy and
understanding that ultimately transcends place.
IV. Narrative: History and Duration of Project
Preliminary research for this project can be traced to a series of workshops and seminars
Brenda Werth and Paola Hernández co-designed and facilitated at different conference venues
from 2008-2010. In August 2009, Werth and Hernández conducted a five-day work group titled
“The World and the Stage: Revisiting Paradigms, Envisioning Rights,” held at the ten-day
conference Staging Citizenship: Performance and Politics of Cultural Rights, sponsored by
NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Bogotá, Colombia. The group’s
13
objectives were to revisit key twentieth-century theatrical paradigms in an emerging global
framework characterized by the adoption of multilateral legal, cultural, and social networks, the
establishment of international recognition and jurisdiction of human rights, the revision of
physical and virtual borders, and changing notions of citizenship. Werth and Hernández proposed
and carried out subsequent versions of the work group with colleagues Kerry Bystrom
(University of Connecticut, Storrs) and Florian Becker (Bard College) at the conferences Theater,
Performance, DestiNation, sponsored by The American Society for Theatre Research, held in San
Juan, Puerto Rico in November 2009, and at Creoles, Diasporas, Cosmopolitanisms, sponsored
by The American Comparative Literature Association, held in New Orleans in April 2010.
Inspired by the intellectual exchange these conferences fostered on theater and human
rights, Werth, Hernández, and Becker designed a co-edited volume called Worlds, Stages,
Publics: Imagining Twenty-first Century Theatre, presently under review at the Studies on
International Performance Series at Palgrave Macmillan. The project proposed here builds on
Worlds, Stages, Publics by continuing to focus on the examination of critical relationships
between global neoliberalism, ethics, and spectatorship in twenty-first century performance and
theater, but shifts attention crucially to the analysis of the politics of place through an urban lens
and develops an original interdisciplinary framework linking urban and performance studies, in
which to investigate the performative imagination of cities in the Americas.
Core researchers Werth, Hernández, Ana Puga, and Fernando Rosenberg have also
attended and participated actively in the last two Encuentros or ten-day scholarly conferences and
performance festivals organized by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics,
held in Buenos Aires and in Bogotá in 2009. The current project adapts and furthers the
hemispheric approach to understanding performance and politics across the Americas and will
continue to benefit from and contribute to past and ongoing intellectual engagement with the
Institute.
14
Directed by Eric Hershberg, immediate Past President of the Latin American Studies
Association, and recently inaugurated in 2010, The Center for Latin American and Latino Studies
at American University in Washington DC (CLALS) will play a central role in fostering the
implementation of proposed research activities. Specifically, the Center will assist in generating
the website for presentation and public dissemination of the project as well as providing the space
and facilities for the proposed scholarly meetings. The Center’s joint focus on Latino and Latin
American Studies reflects the efforts to rethink cultural, political, racial, economic, and
intellectual relationships along new lines that probe and unsettle the traditional border lines that
have historically reinforced divides between North and South. In this sense, CLALS is the ideal
venue for hosting our project and for promoting the objectives out forth by NEH’s “Bridging
Cultures” initiative.
IV. Narrative: Staff
The project working group consists of seven core collaborators. The Principal
Investigator will be Brenda Werth, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at American
University. Dr. Werth’s research until now has focused on contemporary Latin American theater
and the role of performance in negotiating post-conflict memory politics and human rights
discourse. She is author of Theater, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina (Palgrave
2010), which examines the intervention of theater and performance in the memory politics
surrounding Argentina’s return to democracy and in the context of the growing influence of
global economic, legal, and cultural systems in the nineties onward. She is also co-editor, with
15
Paola Hernández and Florian Becker, of Worlds, Stages, Publics. Imagining Global Rights in
Twenty-first-Century Theater, currently under review at Palgrave, which analyzes the effects
shifting global paradigms have on theater’s engagement with human rights and proposes a critical
reassessment of spectatorship, empathy, and accountability for the twenty-first century.
Paola Hernández is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her area of specialization is Latin American Theater and
performance and her research interests include documentary theater, globalization theory,
memory studies, and audience reception. Her most recent book is titled El teatro de Argentina y
Chile. Globalización, resistencia y desencanto (Argentine and Chilean Theater: Globalization,
Resistance, and Disillusionment, Corregidor, Buenos Aires, 2009). Her current research considers
documentary theater from Lima, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, and Santiago to examine the diverse
ways the genre intersects with the urban to engage discourses of truth, memory, and historical
revisionism onstage in the twenty-first century. Dr. Hernández is also the Book Review editor for
Latin American Theatre Review.
A scholar, theater practitioner, and translator, Ana Puga is Assistant Professor at Ohio
State University where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Theatre and the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is currently a fellow at the Stanford University
Center for Latin American Studies. Besides literature and criticism, her interests include
dramaturgy, translation, and performance. She is author of Allegory, Memory, and Testimony:
Upstaging Dictatorship, a study of five South American playwrights who tried to resist
dictatorship. She has also published an anthology of translations of plays by Chilean writer Juan
Radrigán, Finished from the Start and Other Plays (Northwestern UP, 2008). Dr. Puga is
currently interested in exploring how both US Latino and Latin American performances by and
about urban migrant diasporas create transnational spaces that connect one city to another across
physical distance and despite various types of barriers (physical and legal) created by nationstates.
16
Marcy Schwartz is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers
University. She specializes in twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture, with
particular emphasis on urban studies, exile, and photography. Dr. Schwartz is author of Writing
Paris: Urban Topographies of Desire in Contemporary Latin American Fiction (SUNY Press,
1999), Invenciones urbanas: ficción y ciudad latinoamericanas (Urban Interventions: Fiction and
Latin American Cities, Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 2010), and she co-edited the books
Photography and Writing in Latin America: Double Exposures (U of New Mexico P, 2006), with
Mary Beth Tierney-Tello, and Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature (SUNY
Press, 2002), with Daniel Balderston. Her current research concerns the intersection of narrative,
visual media and urban space in twentieth and twenty-first-century Latin America.
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz is Assistant Professor of Sociology at American University. His
academic interests include U.S. race and ethnic studies, Puerto Rican/Latino studies, and
sex/gender/sexuality scholarship, as well as transgender/transsexual studies and Queer Theory.
Dr. Vidal-Ortiz’s grassroots-based experience includes HIV/AIDS
prevention/services/community research, Latino queer organizing, progressive philanthropy, and
program and organizational development. His current book project is titled, “An Instrument of the
Orishas:” Racialized Sexual Minorities in Santería, and he co-edited Lionel Cantú’s The
Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men, with Nancy Naples
(NYU Press). Dr. Vidal-Ortiz plays an active role on several committees of the American
Sociological Association and currently serves as acting Chair of a new section called Sociology of
the Body and Embodiment. Dr. Vidal-Ortiz had an instrumental role in conceptualizing and
promoting the vision and design of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American
University. He received a Fulbright fellowship to conduct research and teach at the Pontificia
Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia in Spring Semester of 2011. Trained as a sociologist
in a number of qualitative methods, Vidal-Ortiz provides a vital link in enhancing understanding
of our project for audiences in the social sciences.
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Ana Serra is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at American University. Dr
Serra's research and teaching examine the intersection between state discourse and cultural
products in Latin America, particularly during the revolutionary era that started with the Cuban
Revolution. She is interested in the rhetorical devices employed in literary works, testimonials
and film to support, subvert or sometimes explode radical ideologies, as well as explain their
origins and possibilities. She is author of The New Man in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the
Revolution (University of Florida Presses, 2007). Dr. Serra’s recent research focuses on cinematic
representations of the city of Havana in the aftermath of the Special Period, which expose the
paradox between the ruins of a decaying city and its recovery as a spectacular location in a
political and artistic sense. Her next book project will focus on key moments of the symbolic
relationship between Cuba and Spain, and their on representations of the city of Havana on Cuban
films produced in the island and the diaspora.Dr. Serra also serves as Director of the MA program
in Spanish and Latin American Studies at American University.
Fernando J. Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative
Literature at Brandeis University. His research interests include critical and post-colonial theory,
modernism and modernity, art and performance, and legal topics in the arts. Dr. Rosenberg is
author of The Avant-garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh UP, 2006). In 2006
Rosenberg co-edited an issue of the e-misférica, the journal of the Hemispheric Institute of
Performance and Politics, with Jill Lane titled “Performance and the Law.” He has written an
essay on tango in film. His current book project analyzes the post-human rights construction of
justice in Latin American documentaries, art exhibits, and literary narratives.
IV. Narrative: Methods
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Our project includes five main components, each of which contributes significantly to the
investigation, intellectual exchange, and dissemination of products and outcomes related to the
central research questions outlined in this proposal:
1) Research Workshop: This workshop, scheduled at the beginning of the grant period (December
2011), will bring the seven core research collaborators together for one day at the Center for Latin
American and Latino Studies at American University in Washington DC. The objective of this
workshop is to create a forum for the core collaborators to present their research inquiries on
performance and cities and to describe their disciplinary approaches to the central questions of the
proposal. At the workshop, researchers will also design the structure and content of the edited
volume, to be completed and submitted to publishers at the end of the grant period in June 2013.
Researchers will also make final arrangements for the international research conference on cities
and performance in the Americas, to be held in September 2012.
2) Field Research: Between December 2011 and September 2012, each core collaborator will
carry out field research in two cities in the Americas (see appendix for detailed description of
fieldwork). In each city, researchers will attend and (if possible) film performances, interview
artists and spectators, visit and photograph the performance space, attend rehearsals, visit the
relevant archives at libraries, research institutes, compile reviews of performances, meet with
scholars of performance and urban studies, and present research at local academic venues. Having
researchers work with “twin” cities will facilitate a comparative framework in which to compare
and contrast urban performative practices while conceptualizing the ways the interaction across
and between cities helps constitute alternative, supranational communities. This approach to
“twinning” cities also furthers the objectives of NEH’s “Bridging Cultures” initiative and
enlarging understanding of other places, perspectives, and intellectual traditions through detailed
analysis of the continuities that link and influence different cities across North and South
America. This comparative framework will inform the introductions to each of the three sections
of the edited volume (see below).
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3) International Conference on Performance and Cities: In September 2012, The Center for Latin
American and Latino Studies in Washington DC will host a two-day international conference on
performance and cities in the Americas. The speakers will include the seven core grant
researchers and eighteen invited speakers from North and South America, who are experts in
performance and/or urban studies, or whose work establishes significant dialogue with paradigms
and currents that intersect meaningfully with our project, such as global neoliberalism, memory,
citizenship, and transnational resistance. The twenty-four speakers (see appendix) will be divided
into six panels of four to be held over the course of two days (three panels per day). At the end of
each day, there will be a roundtable session to summarize main ideas, identify central themes,
reassess debates, draw conclusions, and propose new research questions for future research. From
the papers presented at this conference, eight will be chosen to be included in the edited volume.
4) Edited Volume: The edited volume will include fifteen essays contributed by the seven core
grant researchers and eight additional scholars who present their work at the International
Conference on Performance and Cities. Essays will be grouped in three sections of five,
corresponding to the three sections established in the proposal narrative: 1) Biographical maps,
city space, and global memory; 2) Global neoliberalism and grassroots intervention; 3)
Imagination, Reception, and Circulation of the Twenty-first Century City. Essays written in
Spanish or Portuguese will be translated professionally to English. The edited volume will be
completed and ready for submission to publishers by June 2012.
5) Web Component: Over the course of the one and a half grant year period, The Center for Latin
American and Latino Studies at American University will build a website dedicated to featuring
the research being conducted in different cities in the Americas. Available to the public, the site
will include an archive including photographs and videos of performances, interviews with artists,
and critical essays. Jointly, core researchers will collaborate with NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of
Performance and Politics to help develop a thematic module on performance and cities.
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V. Narrative: Final Products and Dissemination
The final products of this research project will be disseminated publicly through diverse modes
and technologies, in both print and electronic form, for a broad international and interdisciplinary
audience consisting of scholars, students, artists, and individuals, in general, who are interested in
performance and urban culture.
1) International Conference on Performance and Cities: Hosted by the Center for Latin American
and Latino Studies at American University in September 2012, this conference will bring scholars
together from cities across the Americas who are interested in establishing critical bridges
between the disciplines of urban studies and performance, as well as producing and disseminating
intellectual work fostered by the conference in their home universities and institutions. All core
researchers are bilingual or fluent in both Spanish and English (several are also proficient in
Portuguese), which will ensure that essays presented are translated and that communication is
smooth, clear, and productive. The conference program, links to abstracts and select essays, and
podcasts of roundtable sessions will be made available on the website for the Center for Latin
American and Latino Studies: http://www.american.edu/clals/index.cfm
2). Edited Volume: The research findings and outcomes will be collected in a co-edited, scholarly
volume, to be distributed internationally in academic libraries and research institutes. The essays
will feature the research findings based on the fieldwork carried out by the seven core
collaborators, as well as eight additional essays selected from the presentations given at the
International Conference on Performance and Cities. The co-edited volume will be the first joint
scholarly publication to represent the project on performance and cities in the Americas. It will
provide a solid foundation for the development of future projects that grow from its publication
and dissemination.
3) Scholarly Collaboration in Cities: Core researchers will collaborate actively with artists,
scholars, and audiences in the cities where they undertake their research. This collaboration (and
dissemination of research) may take the form of public talks, presentations at academic
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conferences, lectures to students, participation in workgroups, and interviews, depending on the
circumstances of each research site.
4) Websites: Ongoing research and findings on performance and cities will be made available to
the public on websites sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at
American University and The Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU.
5) Other International Conferences: Core researchers will organize panels, workgroups, or
seminars to discuss the outcomes and engage other scholars and students in dialogue on research
on performance and cities at several interdisciplinary conferences such as the Latin American
Studies Association, The Association of Theatre Research, The Annual Meeting for the American
Sociological Association, and the biennial academic conference/performance festival, or
Encuentros, hosted by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.
VI. Narrative: Work Plan
December 1, 2011- May 31, 2012:
•
Hold one-day workshop at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American
University (December 3, 2011) to convene core collaborators in order to discuss research
objectives and proposed fieldwork, and to plan the edited volume and the International
Conference on Performance and Cities. Participants include the Director of the Center,
Eric Hershberg, and core collaborators Brenda Werth, Paola Hernández, Ana Puga,
Marcy Schwartz, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Ana Serra, and Fernando Rosenberg.
Administrative support will be provided by CLALS staff.
•
Core researchers prepare and undertake field research in cities (see appendix):
Brenda Werth: New York / Montevideo
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Paola Hernández: Lima / Mexico City
Ana Puga: Havana / Miami
Salvador Vidal-Ortiz: Bogotá / San Juan
Marcy Schwartz: Santiago / Buenos Aires
Ana Serra: Havana / Miami
Fernando Rosenberg: New York / Buenos Aires
June 1 – November 31, 2012:
•
Organize and host International Conference on Performance and Cities, to be held at the
Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University (September 14-16,
2012) (see appendix for participants).
•
Write and compile introduction and essays for edited volume.
•
Design and add content to websites.
•
Propose and lead panels, seminars, and workgroups at international conferences
LASA (San Francisco, May 2012), ASTR, ASA, NYU Hemimispheric Instittute
Encuentros (Mexico City, March 2012).
December 1, 2012 – May 31, 2013
•
Complete and submit finished edited volume to publishers by May 31, 2013
•
Propose and lead panels, seminars, and workgroups at international conferences (LASA,
ASTR, ASA, Hemi Encuentros).
•
Add final information to websites.
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